ABSTRACT
After the foundation of psychoanalytic institutes in Berlin (1920), Vienna (1922), and London (1925), the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute (1929-1933) was among the first European institutes. Its closure in 1933 at the hands of the National Socialists, along with the transformation of the Berlin Institute into a state-governed psychotherapeutic institute, obliterated for a long time all memory of psychoanalysis in Germany. In West Germany, Alexander Mitscherlich was able to found a new "Institute and Training Centre for Psychoanalysis and Psychosomatic Medicine" in Frankfurt in 1960, which was renamed the "Sigmund-Freud-Institute" (SFI) in 1964. The German Federal State of Hessen financed this foundation as an act of reparation for psychoanalysis. From 1995 onwards, the institute mainly focused on research and the training branch was given to the newly founded Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute (FPI). The SFI was now defined as a purely psychoanalytic research institute and remains the only state-supported institute devoted solely to psychoanalytic research up to the present. Due to the changes in the scientific world, it had to be structured in new ways over the last 15 years. The SFI is now an internationally and interdisciplinary well-known and productive psychoanalytic research institute.
ABSTRACT
With respect to theorisations of psychical splitting, this paper explores the psychical mechanisms that underlie different forms of social splitting. The paper first outlines Freud's and Kleins different theorisations of the psychical mechanisms of splitting, where the good is split from the bad, the inside split from the outside, and the painful disavowed. I then consider the psychical mechanisms of splitting that underlie ideological supports of certain social systems, specifically that of National Socialist Germany, East Germany during the Cold War period, and neoliberal capitalism. Here, I consider ideological splits between good and evil, the relation between external and internal splits, the relation between geographical, social and internal splitting, as well as splitting as disavowal of the other.
